As bitter cold continues to grip much of North America and helps spawn the fierce storm along the East Coast, the question arises: What’s the influence of climate change?

Some scientists studying the connection between climate change and cold spells, which occur when cold Arctic air dips south, say that they may be related. But the importance of the relationship is not fully clear yet.

The Arctic is not as cold as it used to be — the region is warming faster than any other — and studies suggest that this warming is weakening the jet stream, which ordinarily acts like a giant lasso, corralling cold air around the pole.

The facts need not detain us here – because there aren’t any. It’s just speculation – “could”, “may” – gleaned from conversations with tame “experts” at institutions like the notoriously alarmist and fervently left-wing Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. And there’s plenty more nonsense where this came from, as Thomas Williams reported here earlier.

This determination to argue, against all evidence, that the planet is in a warming phase and that we must do more to try to cool it down would be quite funny if it didn’t have such terrible real world consequences.

One of these is the current energy crisis being experienced across New England. Blue states which bought into the man-made global warming narrative, shut down their coal-fired power stations, rejected the Access Northeast Pipeline and instead, despoiled their landscapes with more ugly, expensive, bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco crucifixes are now paying a bitter price.

Unrelenting cold since late December has caused energy demand to spike, pushing up prices and straining supplies. New England power companies are struggling to keep up with demand.

New England’s current energy woes are the result of years of state and federal policies aimed at closing coal and oil-fired power plants, largely as part of the region’s effort to fight global warming.

Yep. It’s true that mostly liberals are affected by this – and created this mess. But still, liberals’ children feel the cold as badly as conservatives’ children. In fact, being less robust and more snowflakey, probably even more so. Must they really suffer for their parents’ stupidity?

Another is the havoc the green ideology has wreaked on honest science and on once-trustworthy government institutions such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The doughty Paul Homewood has unearthed what looks very much like yet another NOAA data-rigging scandal.

Put simply, researchers such as Marlene Kretschmer – the expert from the Potsdam Institute heavily quoted in the New York Times piece – are trying to pin recent cold winters on movements of the jet stream. This enables them to promote their “global warming is still happening” narrative. But for it to work it requires them to write off the recent cold winters, such as the one in 2013/14, as being “anomalous” – ie abnormally cold.

If they are anomalous, though, how come this fact doesn’t show up in NOAA’s temperature charts?

Homewood notes:

When she introduced [Kretschmer’s] work on the subject in 2014, Jennifer Francis specifically referred to the severe cold snap that affected the Northeast in January and February 2014, using it as an example.